Crossfit Open

We've been pretty busy lately without anything big to blog about. Most of our weekend have been consumed with housework and the Crossfit Open. For the last 5 weeks, Crossfit HQ has released a workout every Thursday that thousands of people from all over the world complete and log their scores to see how they stack up against everyone else. Ryan has competed in this once before, but this was the first year that I signed up for it. This was also the first year that they released scaled versions of each workout as well. They did that so that more people could have the ability to participate in the event at all different levels, however, this also meant that the prescribed (non scaled) workout was even tougher than usual. I really wanted to be able to complete all of the workouts as prescribed, mostly to give myself a benchmark to work off of in the future. Surprisingly I was able to do all but one of the workouts at the Rx level! I was pretty excited about that, especially since a couple of them forced me to learn movements I didn't even know I could do (handstand pushups)!

The final workout was rowing and thrusters...this was my first attempt at it...I did it again two days later for a faster time.

In order to do a full handstand pushup I had to learn how to kip (throw my legs up to help push mu body up)

Yay, I can now do handstand pushups! (this was attempt 2 at the work out...I got 3 more handstand pushups than I did the first time...those are a beast!

I certainly didn't have any high hopes of winning anything, but it was really cool to be able to see where I was at amongst my peers and have new goals of getting better and stronger in the future!



Ryan also did awesome...but we already knew he was strong ;)

Winter in the Valley

This weekend we got a long weekend and got to play in the snow! Everywhere on the west coast has been seriously lacking in snow accumulation. Our Whistler trip was the only time we've been snowboarding because the mountains near us are kinda patchy with snow at least on the bottom. Fingers crossed for some spring snow. Anyway, they do have some snow in the Methow Valley which is North East of Seattle. There also happens to be a pretty amazing mountain house that just completed in the area designed by my talented husband. So we made a weekend out of a few snow sports and visiting with the clients and checking out the new house!

Someone thinks he's a lap dog.

We drove out to the Valley Saturday morning getting there just after noon and started out with a snowshoe hike. As soon as we started the hike we saw a pretty large bone (maybe a big deer or a cow) with all the meat eaten off of it. Didn't really think about it too much. Not too much later we saw another leg bone...hoof still in tact, no meat on it. Something on this trail was devouring large mammals...slightly terrifying. We saw a lot of good sized tracks in the snow too. I'm pretty convinced that with the warmer than usual temps lately, the bears were out in full force. I saw several tracks that looked to me like bears! That all made for a bit of a leery hike up the mountain, but we made it out of there alive!

Someone is missing a foot...











Sunday we moved on to our next winter sport...cross-country skiing. I forgot how relaxing cross-country skiing is, and it's an awesome work out. It was a beautiful day out too, so we ended up in t-shirts by the end.











After our skiing adventure we headed over to the house Ryan designed to get a few photos in the daylight. We also came back a few hours later to take some night shots and to have dinner with the clients and the contractor and his wife. It was a ton of fun, and they happen to all be really great people to hang out with.





Monday we checked out of our hotel and picked up some fat bikes for the morning. They're basically mountain bikes with fatter tires to grip better in snow. I had never tried biking in snow before and the trail we went to was so much fun! Just riding up and down hills of snow!









After a few hours of riding we hit the road and headed back to Seattle and back to real life of cleaning up our house and getting ready for work...boooo. Time to plan the next adventure :)



Whistler Weekend

We just had a long weekend for MLK day, so I figured we needed to sneak in a trip somewhere to make use of that extra day. We decided a road trip up to Whistler was an appropriate winter long weekend! After booking it, Lauren decided to fly up from SF for the weekend too and another friend decided to join in on the weekend fun too! Lauren, Ryan, Ben and I drove up Friday night. I joined Lauren for a lesson on Saturday to get things started. It was a fun first time ever snowboarding for Lauren!



By Saturday night, Cheryl had gotten into town to join us. On Sunday, Lauren took another lesson and Cheryl, Ryan , and I hit up the big mountain! It was super cold up at the top of the mountain and especially on the open lifts. After a couple of lifts, we had to run into a lodge and get some more gear to bundle up in. The snow was fresh though, so it was a great full day of riding!













Monday we were originally planning on getting up and heading home, but then we looked at the weather forecast. It looked like it was going to be a perfect sunny day! Also, Lauren wanted to go on the rest of the mountain after her 2 days of lessons, so that's what we did! It was so pretty out and it was finally not too windy for the top lifts to be open, so we were able to go all the way to the peak of the mountain and ride down. 

















3 days of snowboarding was exhausting, but an awesome weekend. Now back to a short work week!

Christmas and New Years

We just returned from a fabulous two part holiday vacation...part one: Christmas in Michigan! We flew in Christmas Eve and quickly got dressed and ready for the Christmas Eve church service. Turns out traveling all day makes you pretty exhausted. We were supposed to go to another party immediately afterwards, but decided take out Chinese food, frozen chicken wings, and large amounts of wine at home was a better idea. I mean, we did have a house of 9 people already, so we had our own party.

Detroit Airport

Christmas Day we got moving a little slow, but fast enough to open gifts before people came over for the next party! Uncle Rick's family came over for the traditional king crab legs and pizza. Soooo much delicious crab...we devoured it all!
























Next day...another party...whew! This time it was the Raetz side of the family which meant sooo many small children running around our house! Holy cow that was a lot of energy. It was great to get Grandma to see everyone at the same time.



Next day...another party...this time it was a baby shower for our cousin Melissa, so girls only. The boys went off to the casinos for the afternoon instead. I can't even imagine how Eric and Melissa are going to fit all that baby stuff in their New York apartment! This was the last party of the week, so after that we turned out attention to football watching the rest of the week.

We headed back to the airport on New Years Eve. Our original plan was to fly back to Seattle that night. A few weeks ago, some auburn friends started putting together plans to all meet up in DC for New Years. It's all a little easier to do last minute planning for them since they're all in the southeast, but after everyone else agreed to meet up for New Years, I couldn't resist adding that to our trip as well. So instead of heading home on New Years Eve, we headed to DC! We ended up with a house full of 10 Auburn friends for our New Years celebration! We hadn't all been together in about a year and a half, so it was so great to see everyone again! It also made for quite the New Years party night!















New years day we did a lot of football watching, then went to a bar for more football watching. After sitting around a eating all day a few of us decided to go for a walk to check out the Christmas decorations at Union Station. DC is such a great city to wander around.







The next morning we wandered down the street to Union Market. Oh my, I would be in trouble if I lived that close to this amazing place. It was just booth after booth of amazing food selections! I wish I could have gone back after day to try out each place. After all that food consumption we decided it was a good idea to do some more walking, so we headed down to the Capital building, walked around some sites, then ended up at an upper floor bar overlooking the white house.







This was our last night all together and by this time we were all pretty exhausted, so we headed back to the Smith house where Evelyn had amazingly prepared me a giant home made dish of tiramisu for my birthday! I was super impressed by those culinary skillz! Having my birthday that weekend was another good excuse to make this trip. It was my birthday present to hang out with so many of my favorite people, it made me so happy!

We didn't head out till the evening on the 3rd, so we spent the afternoon relaxing and watching movies with the last few people before heading out for our long trip home.